Platform Pillars
Paceghost measures AI visibility across three pillars. Each pillar answers a different question about how your domain appears in AI-driven search and discovery.
SEO — Traditional Search
Section titled “SEO — Traditional Search”The question: Where does my domain rank in traditional search engine results?
How we measure it: Paceghost runs your key search terms through traditional search engines — Google Organic and Bing Organic. We record whether your domain appears (“Found”), at what position, and with what snippet.
Signal strength: A ranking in traditional search is the baseline — if you’re not visible here, you’re invisible to a large portion of your audience.
Active endpoints:
- Google Organic
- Bing Organic
GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation
Section titled “GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation”The question: Does my domain appear in AI-augmented search results?
How we measure it: Paceghost queries Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, and You.com with your key terms. These are search engines that use LLMs to generate answers alongside or instead of traditional results. We detect whether your domain is found, cited, mentioned, or linked in these generated responses.
Signal strength: AI-augmented search is the fastest-growing discovery channel. A domain that ranks well in SEO but is invisible in GEO is missing the new front door to information.
Active endpoints:
- Google AI Overview
- Google AI Mode
- You.com
AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation
Section titled “AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation”The question: What do AI models say about my domain when asked directly?
How we measure it: Paceghost sends your key terms as direct prompts to multiple large language models — GPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek, and more. We record whether the model mentions your domain in its response and at what position.
Signal strength: Direct LLM queries represent how users will discover information in the near future — asking AI assistants directly rather than searching. If your domain is never mentioned, you don’t exist in this channel.
Active models (varies by tier):
- Free: 3 models
- Founder / Starter: 8 models
- Pro / Business: 10 models
- Enterprise: 15 models (all active models)
How the Pillars Work Together
Section titled “How the Pillars Work Together”The three pillars form a complete picture of AI visibility. A domain might rank #1 in SEO (strong traditional search) but never appear in GEO or AEO (invisible to AI-augmented search and LLMs). Another domain might have poor SEO but strong AEO presence because multiple LLMs mention it favourably.
The Visibility Benchmark runs all three pillars simultaneously on the same keywords from your Synthetic Domain Profile, giving you a point-in-time snapshot of your AI search presence.
Hit Quality
Section titled “Hit Quality”When detecting domain mentions and citations, Paceghost uses triple-pass brand matching:
- Exact match — apex domain in response content (highest value)
- Brand name match — brand or product name found in response
- Partial match — domain components or common variations
Common words that happen to match partial domain components (e.g., “apple” for apple.com in a cooking context) may produce false positives. The raw results include context so you can verify relevance.